There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [83]
But the fact was, in reality, it was a mystery as to what had happened with this book and why. It was something Brooke would simply never know and she simply had to settle for that fact, her mother told her a couple of nights later when she was in bed and thrashing about and pulling up all the covers, and couldn’t sleep at all for the very much wanting to know. It was her third night of not getting to sleep because of it. It was nearly 2am. Count backwards from five hundred, her mother said. Count sheep. But it wasn’t that kind of a not-sleeping night. It was a different kind of not-sleeping from the kind where all the dead people from history line up instead of sheep, looking with sad long faces and queuing for miles and miles at a gate too high for them to jump over, so many there’s no way you could count them. Queuing for Miles! it would have been good if all these people went and queued outside Mr. Garth’s window and not at the end of Brooke’s bed! all the people who died in Haiti when their houses fell on them, just collapsed out of nowhere, and all the people who died in the tsunami, who got swept away, children as well, and the people whose aeroplane crashed into the sea, and the boy who was ten who was executed because he stole a loaf of bread because he was hungry, and the boy who was stabbed to death outside a school just because he was black, and the girl whose body was dug up in a back garden who had been murdered by the man, and all the people killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Darfur and Sudan, and they were just the ones at the front of all the people who had died when they weren’t meant to in all the other historic wars, and even the children who had died because they were being made to work in factories or clean chimneys in Victorian times or who were executed to death for things like stealing less than fourteen pence. You don’t need to say executed to death, her mother said then, because to death is implied in executed. Her mother was getting impatient. But the Secret Agent awakeness about the words was a much more annoying kind of awakeness. There was no one to say sorry to in the Secret Agent awakeness. The person who somebody should be saying sorry to was Brooke! for making her not be able to know what the answer to why the words were chosen was! Brooke had to decide, her mother was saying now, again, that if she wanted to read that book and not be annoyed by the not-knowing, she would either just have to persuade herself, right now, to put up with the not-knowing, or she would have to make the active decision to rub out the circles that made the words stand out for whatever their unknowable reason was, and then she’d be able to read the book without it annoying her. Brooke put her head under the pillow. It defeats the purpose, she said under there. She wondered if her mother could hear what she’d said from under the pillow. Her mother was saying something. Brooke couldn’t hear properly. She took the pillow off her head again. My special eraser from the office tomorrow, her mother was saying, the really good one, will that do? Thank you, Brooke said. It will have to do. Her mother kissed her goodnight and switched off the light and drew the door over. But inside Brooke’s head what she thought as she closed her eyes knowing she would not sleep, was: it will not do. She opened her eyes and saw the ceiling above her.)
The fact is, Brooke is the six hundred and seventy-fifth person clicked into the Observatory today by Mr. Jackson with the people-counting clicker which it is his job to hold. Sometimes when Mr. Jackson is in a bad mood he won’t tell you which number you are. Today he is in quite a good mood. Well, if it isn’t the London Eye, he says. Where’ve you been? I haven